Food First Blog

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Big news! AIB International added fruit filled pastries to the collection of product-specific Baking Process Kill Step Calculators. Significant resources have been invested in this project to develop kill step validation tools for the food industry.

This is the tenth calculator developed by AIB International with other calculators available for cheesecakes, flour tortillas, yeast-raised doughnuts, nut muffins, cake muffins, whole wheat multigrain bread, crisp cookies, soft cookies, and hamburger buns. All calculators and published research information are available for free download at www.aibonline.org. If your facility is interested in learning about kill step validation directly from an AIB International expert at your facility, consultations and private training are available.

Commercial bakers can use these calculators to evaluate the lethality of a thermal process (baking) to destroy Salmonella in their products and demonstrate the effectiveness of the process to comply with FSMA’s preventive controls rule. The interactive calculators work by using oven time and temperature parameters to automatically determine the total process lethality (e.g., 5 log) for Salmonella. If the desired log reduction is achieved for the baking process and pathogen of concern, the generated report can be used as validation in an FDA inspection.

“Fruit filled pastries are widely produced in multiple formats in the food industry and continue to be popular with consumers,” said Valerie Olson, Senior Director of Bakery Consulting and Food Labeling. “The release of the fruit filled pastry calculator enables the use of AIB International preventive controls in a broad range of product applications.”

Every year, a thorough research is made to identify bakery product category based on the popularity, market share, uniqueness and other baking parameters. For 2018, AIB International selected “fruit filled pastry”, in consultation with ABA-FTRAC (American Bakers Association’s Food Technical and Regulatory Affairs Committee), as this represents a unique bakery category compared to our earlier bakery products selected for KSV research. Here, the principle filling ingredient is fruit (apple, pineapple, etc.) which is wrapped and cooked in layers of phyllo pastry.